A Perfectly Foolish Young Man I Wanted 1

The flower thus far of Carl Halling's writings was first collected in early 2012 as the works Where the Halling Valley River Lies and Far Beyond the Borderlands of Scotia. And then with the cream of a later work, The Boy from the Tail End of the Goldhawk Road being added, this same flower became What Though Are the Wonders of this Brief Life, When Compared to the Fathomless Joy Awaiting, As a Perfectly Foolish Young Man I Wanted, Everything to Prove to the World Something, Paid for my Past in a Worldly Sense, Compared to the Fathomless Joy Awaiting and A Perfectly Foolish Young Man I Wanted. And so consisting to the best of my knowledge of Halling Valley and Scotia in their entirety with modifications...and extracts from the previously published eBook, At the Tail End of the Goldhawk Road, again with modifications...as well as selected extracts from The Boy from the Tail End of the Goldhawk Road. With still more widespread minor edits taking place in 2013 and 2014. It's a truly panoramic work, much of it of overt or subtle autobiographical origin, an incredibly informative compendium of essays, verses, memoirs &c., created in a spirit of Christian truth and integrity...a thrilling voyage...featuring culture, history, art, literature, verse...addiction, humour, redemption, faith, love and so much more besides. While in the cases of all the autobiographical writings except Where the Halling Valley River Lies, names of people have been changed, or modified, to the best of my ability in the name of privacy. Unless, that is, their privacy is unaffected. Or respecting those I consider to be public figures (one of which has been afforded two names, his own and a pseudonym). The same applies to certain places or institutions if I believe naming them might infringe on their right to privacy; thence a certain place of learning has been tendered two names, as in the case of the previously mentioned celebrity. Title and summary edited 16 November 2014.

Submitted:Feb 1, 2013
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Part One Where the
Halling Valley River Lies

Book
One

Leitmotivs from an
English Pastorale

One thing is certain. Paul
Runacles had not been born into a typically privileged upper
middle class family, and so by the time he arrived at his
college, he was bereft of a frame of reference; unlike the
majority of his fellow pupils, weaned on the gilded sports of the
British social elite.And he escaped from his
college once, like some kind of hysterical gymslip
schoolgirl...just the once it was...around 1971 or '72 to avoid
being punished for something stupid he did.It was an utterly pointless
exercise as it was the last day of term, but he just panicked and
bolted, and kept on running...until he ended up wandering through
some muddy field in the heart of the English countryside before
simply giving up and sitting by the side of the
road.But he never did it again,
and in later years, when he looked back at his time as a public
schoolboy, he'd insist if he possessed a single quality that
might be termed noble such as patience, or self-mastery, or
consideration of the needs of other people, then he owed it to
his education, and not least the four years he spent at his
college.Yet, looking at the facts
after his eventual exit, you'd be forgiven for thinking he'd
simply picked up from where he left off before he collapsed in
that muddy field in the heart of the English countryside and
started drifting in circles again leaving so many tasks
unfinished he effectively wrecked his gilded destiny. But in fact
this was far from the truth, for he was never without purpose;
but simply...he lacked the go-getter's ability to turn his dreams
to good account.And looking back on all
he'd lost in late middle age, he'd often weep silently to himself
at night, at the end of yet another day spent doing really very
little when he thought about it.And there'd be times when
certain pieces of quintessentially English pastoral music still
had the power to evoke his strange and sudden flight, or rush of
blood to the head, of over four decades ago. Such as Vaughan
Williams' The Lark Ascending, which seemed
to him to bespeak a passion for the Arcadian soul of England that
verges on the ecstatic. And the same could be said for the
opening sections of Mike Oldfield's Hergest
Ridge, which tended to convey to him a deep mournfulness
silently existent beneath the picture perfect image of English
privilege.Any argument in favour of
such a tragic element would be powerfully reinforced in his eyes
by playing the music of the much-loved singer-songwriter Nick
Drake, who was not so much handsome as beautiful in what could be
called a classically English, soft, wistful, romantic, Shelleyan
fashion, with seemingly perfect skin, full lips and a head of
cascading curls.And in some of his many
photos, he bears an uncanny resemblance to the former Doors front
man Jim Morrison; and like Morrison, he was a poet as much as a
musician. But the likeness ends there, for while Morrison was
able to conquer his natural shyness and become a wildly
charismatic showman, Drake never mastered the art of Rock
performance.However, blessed with a
precocious musical genius, he secured a recording contract with
the Island label while still only twenty years old and at
Cambridge University.On the surface of things,
he was destined for a long and happy life, but unlike his
near-double, was unable to translate his enormous gifts into
commercial success. And he became very seriously depressed as a
result, dying mysteriously at the age of just 26, after having
released only three albums in his lifetime.Looking back from the
vantage point of the early 2010s, Runacles couldn't help thinking
that in any era other than that ushered in by the Rock
revolution, Drake would have pursued a career more suited to his
background and temperament. As opposed to one which, while
ensuring his immortality, clearly caused him an inestimable
amount of pain.And he came to maturity in
a Britain whose young were in active rebellion against the
Judeo-Christian value system on which the nation had been
founded. So was perforce affected by the spiritual chaos of the
times, which propelled him towards the endless night of worldly
philosophy, deadly for a mind as litmus-paper sensitive as
his.And listening in late
middle age to such perfectly English examples of pastoral music
as Drake'sRiver
Man, which seemed to him to
bespeak a passion for the Arcadian soul of England that verges on
the ecstatic, Runacles became suddenly cognizant of a colossal
compassion within himself.But not just for the
youthful Runacles...who ran away from his college once like some
kind of hysterical gymslip schoolgirl...so much as for the
privileged classes as a whole...those traditionally educated at
public schools.A somewhat unusual
receptacle for the milk of human kindness, some might say. But
the privileged among us are surely no less in need of
consideration than any other social class.For despite the fact that
the vast majority of those who pass through the British public
school system go on to lead full and successful lives entirely
free from melancholy, social advantage can clearly be a heavy
burden to bear for some. Such as Nick Drake who sang so
devastatingly of "falling so far on a silver spoon" in the dark
pastorale, Parasite.As to Runacles, he'd not
been born into a typically privileged upper middle class family,
and so by the time he arrived at his public school, he was bereft
of a frame of reference, unlike the majority of his fellow
pupils, weaned on the gilded sports of the British social
elite.Yet, a close connection
existed in the shape of his paternal grandmother, arguably born
into what was once known as the lower gentry, in as much as her
father was independently wealthy, and so had no need to work.
Yet, she left her first husband to live in Australia with a man
she'd met in Ceylon while working on a tea plantation, a Danish
citizen who'd allegedly once been a successful businessman, until
some reversal of fortune reduced him in social status. His
mother, on the other hand, was the product of working class
immigrants to British Canada from Ulster, Ireland and Lowland
Scotland. And it amused him to think there was a good chance
distant relatives of his continued to live in these
regions.But that was not the reason
he had trouble adapting to public school life, for his brother
positively thrived within it.No, there was something
intrinsically askew about Runacles himself. For after all, who
thinks of running away on the last day of term without any
purpose or aim, only to finish up collapsed by the side of a
muddy field in the heart of the English
countryside?The truth is while public
schools have long served as the traditional places of learning
for future members of the British governing and professional
classes, they have never done so in the capacity of pampering wet
nurses.And so not every child who
finds themselves within the bosom of such institutions is able to
develop along extraverted lines. For during Runacles' time at his
own college, there were boys who responded to the intensely
hierarchical nature of public school life with varying degrees of
self-effacement. And not just initially, for most new boys are
inclined to quail when confronted with this ancient way of life
for the first time, but afterwards too. So that they remained
relatively quiescent even while succeeding within the
system.Yet he himself was not
among them, for while he could hardly be said to have thrived, he
was yet happy in his own way, and enormously popular. What they
used to call a character. So this strange flight of his was
totally out of character, especially seeing as he was famous for
his resilience, having been one of the most intensely disciplined
pupils of his generation.But he never ran away
again, and in later years, when he looked back at his time as a
public schoolboy, he'd insist if he possessed a single quality
that might be termed noble such as patience, or self-mastery, or
consideration of the needs of other people, then he owed it to a
significant degree to his education, and not least the four years
he spent at public school.Yet, looking at the facts
after his eventual exit, you'd be forgiven for thinking he'd
simply picked up from where he left off before he collapsed in
that muddy field in the heart of the English countryside and
started drifting in circles again, leaving so many tasks
unfinished he effectively wrecked his gilded destiny. But in fact
this was far from the truth, for he was never without purpose;
but simply...he lacked the go-getter's ability to turn his dreams
into good account.Now, souls in thrall to the
psychological persuasion might assert that failure in life is but
the consummation of an underachieving
childhood.But the Runacles of the
early 2010s had no time for theories of this kind, since pupils
historically written off by their teachers via the medium of the
school report have included the greatest Englishman of them all.
No, not Runacles...Churchill.While many might dispute
this fact, and goodness knows Churchill has his detractors, few
would go so far as to label him an
underachiever.And Runacles himself was
offered multiple opportunities to turn his life around; so why
didn't he do it...simply in order to prove to the world that
while a failure on the surface, he'd been a success all
along?here's no sure way of
knowing why other than to have recourse to a theory earlier
expressed in this piece, that there was something intrinsically
askew about Runacles himself. For after all, who thinks of
running away on the last day of term without any purpose or aim,
only to finish up collapsed by the side of a muddy field in the
heart of the English countryside?

And who knows how long he'd
have sat there, had it not been for the fact that as he did so,
his Divinity teacher happened to spy him while driving by before
offering him a lift back to college.And as might be expected,
by the time he arrived, there was hardly anyone left; yet, he was
summoned by his housemaster, who assured him he'd not be
punished, for after all, it was the last day of term, and school
was over for a month or so, and he was therefore free to do as he
wished within the limits of the law.But there was no one to
take him home, as his mother had earlier departed without him, as
no one was able to tell her where he was. So he contacted his
father, who then set about the hour-long journey from London to
Berkshire to pick him up.And he later heard from his
friends about just how frantic with worry his mother been when,
after innocently turning up to take her son home, she was
informed he was nowhere to be found. One can only imagine what
she went through. And looking back at this terrible afternoon
from the vantage point of late middle age, it pained him deeply
to think of her suffering.But he never ran away
again, and in later years, when he looked back at his time as a
public schoolboy, he'd insist if he possessed a single quality
that might be termed noble, such as patience, or self-mastery, or
consideration of the needs of other people, then he owed it to
his education, and not least the four years he spent at public
school.Yet, looking at the facts
after his eventual exit, you'd be forgiven for thinking he'd
simply picked up from where he left off before he collapsed in
that muddy field in the heart of the English countryside and
started drifting in circles again...leaving so many tasks
unfinished he effectively wrecked his gilded destiny. But in fact
this was far from the truth, for he was never without purpose;
but simply...he lacked the go-getter's ability to turn his dreams
to good account.From the time he was about
seventeen, he was desperate to succeed as actor, musician or
writer, yet the evidence suggests that despite an enchanting and
extrovert personality he was under-equipped for the task he'd set
himself.For instance, he refused to
apply himself to developing as a musician, even when being taught
by a true virtuoso, as was the case towards the end of the
'70s...when a future member of a supergroup struggled manfully to
motivate him. And he was incapable of finishing a single cohesive
piece of writing due to his tendency to allow his teeming
imagination to take him from one unending digression to
another.As to his professional
life, if you can call it that, it was marked by a similar
desultory quality. And in the summer of '77, he worked briefly
for a sailing school on the Costa Brava, but lost his job before
too long; and ended up drifting for a time, spending many a night
at the Disco, where he fell in love with Donna Summer's
A Love Trilogy.And later that year, he
spent a short period of time at Merchant Navy School, before
serving as a salesman in a long-vanished jewellery store in
suburban Kingston, and after calling in sick while working as a
filing clerk early in '78, lost that job too. Still...he'd made a
good friend on his day off in the shape of a young punkette
covered in safety pins who'd spied him wandering aimlessly around
Kingston with spiky blond hair like his Punkdoppelganger, Billy Idol.But by this time, he'd been
accepted as a student at a prestigious drama school in the centre
of London. Although when it came to his actual studies, he failed
to convince the authorities he had what it took to succeed as a
professional, so departed in the summer of
'79.What a hopeless case...but
then what kind of person decamps on the last day of term without
purpose or aim, only to finish up collapsed by the side of a
muddy field in the heart of the English
countryside?For that it was he did; and
he never forgot it, for those four years he spent at boarding
school were his rosebud years, when everything was heightened in
terms of its effects on his temperament which was at once happy
go lucky and high strung, an unusual combination
perhaps.And one that saw him at
once almost universally popular, and yet beset by tics and
twitches. Such as the head-shaking habit he thought he'd never
kick. But which vanished soon after he quit college at the early
age of 16, at which point he which he mutated by degrees from a
round-shouldered youth with a Chaplin-esque walk into a
full-blown narcissus. But what an inefficient Adonis he was...he
couldn't even cut it at acting school.Although the '80s were a
time of relative stability for him, and he worked as an actor for
a time, before completing a degree in French and
Drama.But then he resumed his
maundering ways. And perhaps it's significant that one of his
musical passions around about the turn of the decade at college
had been Led Zeppelin, a band deeply indebted to the Delta Blues
whose Ramble On from the second album, a key
work for him at the time, as well as for a good few of his
contemporaries, possesses vagabondage of a romantic kind as its
principle theme. And there were many songs from the era with a
similar peripatetic motif.But it's surely safe to say
that the vast majority of those who were Underground Rock
acolytes at the same time as him ultimately settled into
conventional occupations. So why not Runacles? Why did he persist
in relative instability way beyond his college
days?It's impossible to say for
certain of course, but it may be that like self-styled poor boy
and rover Nick Drake, he'd been blessed - or cursed - with the
sensitivity of litmus paper. So that the messages being relayed
by the Rock-Youth Counterculture penetrated more profoundly into
his psyche than those of most of his generation. And among those
was an exaltation of rootlessness; born of a spirit of
restlessness.But, there being nothing
new under the sun, its origins lie deep in history, at least as
far back as the great Romantic movement in the arts which
produced wanderers from life and art alike from its inception.
And Romantic nomadism could be said to have reached an apogee in
the shape of the Byronic hero, who went on to exert such a
powerful influence on French Romanticism, which while the last,
was surely the most powerful of the movement's three great waves,
for it was the true forefather of the
avant-garde.And Runacles became an
acolyte of the latter from his late teens, falling in love with
one of its icons after the other...Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Cocteau,
Genet; and in time, he developed a taste for avant-garde
nihilism, and its repudiation of all of the so-called bourgeois
values, including sanity and health, even life
itself.He came to adore the idea
of early death, and to resign himself to dying young himself, in
fact not so much resign as commit himself to it. But out of a
deluded romantic death fixation, as opposed to any genuine desire
to die.And it may be this refusal
to settle into any kind of conventional existence was rooted in a
desire to be one of Jack Kerouac's "mad ones", and so to "burn,
burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like
spiders across the stars..."By the time he quit
university in 1985, he'd been a devotee of this dark ethos for
several years, so that his art was more important to him than his
life; and he welcomed every experience, no matter how ruinous to
his health, if it could serve as fuel to his creativity. And the
art that fascinated him most was literature, and he longed to be
a published writer, but most of what he'd attempted to write
since his late teens remained unfinished.But at university he'd
evolved into a magnetically intense stage actor, and he inspired
many with his performances, as well as his larger than life
personality, so he was likened by one friend to Hesse's Goldmund,
by another to Don Juan... while still another suggested he read
Buchner's Lenz.And one of his tutors
informed him he had the makings of a heroic figure, if not as
actor, then as academic...and even writer.But Runacles would not have
been true to himself had he not failed to justify their faith in
him, and so following his eventual departure, he sought work as a
deliverer of novelty telegrams. But not for the money, which was
excellent, so much as for the sheer joy of showing off, which
points to something awry at the base of his
soul.And by the time he did, he
was well on the way to developing an alcohol problem, which in
later years he'd at least partly blame on what he termed a
negative identity. Which is not to say he was negative in his
attitude to others, for contrary to what may be believed given
the evidence so far, the effect he exerted on others was almost
overwhelmingly positive.Yet he deliberately chose
such an identity as a means of making himself more interesting
than he would otherwise have been; to shock, in other words. And
his motives in doing so weren't entirely frivolous, for his
attraction to the avant-garde was authentic, and rooted in a
deep-rooted raging intelligence that also fuelled his constant,
frenetic defiance of respectable society.And looking back from the
vantage point of late middle age, he'd muse that having foisted
this nihilism onto himself for as long as he had, his
litmus-paper mind had finally started to turn on him by the
middle of the '80s.To begin with, his
empathetic powers started to recede, which caused him enormous
distress, because he'd always found great comfort in his
compassionate and affectionate nature.And he started to drink as
a means of restoring them. But what right did he have to them,
when his negative identity included a corrosive cynicism of the
type he so admired in his avant-garde idols? It's as if he wanted
it both ways; to be loved for his personal sweetness...and yet
reserve the right to rage like Rimbaud whenever he felt like
it.

Yet, his inner turmoil
proved an asset when it came to his acting career, and he
provided some extraordinary performances in the second half of
the '80s.The first of these took
place at the University of Cambridge, where he studied for a term
in the winter of '86 as part of their teacher training unit,
before typically taking off in the early part of the new year.
While the second was at Notting Hill's famous Gate Theatre, where
he received some fair reviews for his acting from various
periodicals including the London Times.But no sooner had he done
so than our boy was on the drift again, taking a job as a teacher
of English as a Foreign Language in one of several TEFL schools
situated on London's teeming Oxford Street. But to be fair, he
needed the work, for the acting profession provides little by way
of remuneration for all but a small minority.And by the time he did, his
drinking was under control, but long-term tendencies had
developed into full-blown Obsessive Compulsive Disorder so that
his day was marked by an endless series of
rituals:At the height of their
intensity, his rituals included parting his hair so that it went
from his crown to a specific point above one of his eyebrows
(he'd carry a tiny mirror on his person for the purpose of
checking on it throughout the day)...ironing his shirts inside
out with the seams inclining to the right, and touching every
item of clothing including his belt with said iron...arranging
the items in his jacket pockets so that they went from left to
right in terms of importance...constantly wiping the insides of
his boots before dousing them with water...and holding an
intimate part of his anatomy for a set number of
beats...But if the physical rituals
were tormenting, the mental ones were even more so. And every
time he met someone, he became beset by a need to compare them to
someone else, so that some kind of card index set to work in his
mind, proffering faces until to his horror it stopped at one
resembling the person in question. And he'd not rest until he'd
calculated the significance of their names.It was as if his mind had
assumed a life all of its own and started producing thoughts
independently of his will. But he came to view it with a certain
morbid fascination; and if he drank enough at night, he was able
to sedate it. It was a wonderful feeling.And yet for all the turmoil
of his existence, he remained almost manically elated by life, so
that on Saturday mornings, he'd often be seized by a sense of joy
so intense it verged on the ecstatic. For all that, though, he
was at all times aware of a need to keep depression at bay, for
on those rare occasions he succumbed to the blues, they were so
violent he could be moved to minor acts of self-harm. But they
were usually short-lived, and once they'd moved on, the elation
returned. It was a wonderful feeling.Yet, there may have come a
time when the latter started being produced not so much
endogenously, as through alcohol. For although he didn't drink on
a daily basis, the effects of his nocturnal binges persisted
throughout the day in the shape of a euphoria which he
supplemented with endless cups of coffee.But as might be expected,
as a result of poor attendance and other issues, he lost his
beloved job early in the 1990s.And having found a degree
of fulfilment in his post as an Oxford Street English teacher
almost unmatched by any other means by which he'd attempted to
make a living, he tried desperately to regain it. But his efforts
were unavailing.So by the summer he'd made
a return to the stage, and despite the fact that his work was
once more the object of justifiable acclaim, it was a short one.
And by the end of the year, he'd embarked on another teacher
training course, quitting this one before the end of the term. At
which point, he set himself up once again as a peripatetic
deliverer of novelty telegrams.But the following winter
saw him roving anew, ending up in Hastings, an English coastal
town with a large London overspill population, a distinction it
shares with several dozen towns throughout the UK, some new, some
older towns like Hastings, expanded to accommodate the
newcomers.And once there, he set
about taking a course intended to net himself a TEFL certificate,
which would entitle him to teach English as a foreign language on
an international basis. Because, he still hankered after his days
as an English teacher of foreign nationals, having effectively
fallen in love with this vocation.But if he thought he was
going to pass the course, he had another thing coming, because
although he was well-liked at Hastings, there were few who knew
him there who'd not be of the opinion that something was
troubling Paul Runacles.Precisely what, they'd be
at loss to say...but one things was certain...his mind had become
such a chaos he was losing his ability to communicate normally
with his fellow man. But he still only drank at night, and to
such an extent there were times he lapsed into incoherency. It
was a wonderful feeling.Soon after returning to
London with nothing to show for a fortnight's hard graft and a
fairly hefty sum of money, Runacles' drinking assumed a lethal
quality from early '91, although in truth it had done so almost a
decade earlier. But there was a new recklessness to it in that it
became diurnal as well as nocturnal. And perforce, in later
years, he'd have little recollection of the rest of '91, and much
of '92 to boot, and so struggle hard to recall precisely how he
spent his time.Looking back from the
vantage point of the early 2010s, he recalled quite regular work
as a television walk-on. And among the parts he fulfilled as such
was that of a crime scene photographer for a long-running British
police series.He also saw a lot of a
close friend from East London, performing with him for a few
years from about 1990 as half of a musical duo in various clubs,
pubs and restaurants, and even busking on one memorable occasion,
which saw the two musicians being showered with cigarettes from
an appreciative member of Leicester Square's homeless
community.And at some point in what
may have been '91...or '92, he resumed his career as a deliverer
of novelty telegrams for a third time.While all throughout this
period, he wrote...constantly...in a bizarre style replete with
archaisms culled from various sources, some being ancient
dictionaries, while one was a cheap facsimile of an ancient
edition of Roget's Thesaurus.In the summer of '92, he
made one final attempt at passing a TEFL course, but the strain
proved too much for him, and he left before it had
finished.While towards the end of
the year, he was praised for his portrayal of Stefano in a
production of The Tempest at Conway Hall in
London's Red Lion Square. This despite the fact he was
intoxicated from his very first rehearsal to the second he quit
the stage after the final curtain call.Thena little later, he accepted
a small part in a play based on the life of James Joyce's
beautiful troubled daughter Lucia to be performed at the Lyric
Studio, Hammersmith. By which time, he'd embarked on yet another
teaching training course; and resumed his career as a deliverer
of novelty telegrams for the fourth and final
time.And while his life was
hectic, he lived it as if in a dream, which is to say in a state
of near-constant elation occasioned by vast quantities of
alcohol.It's difficult to explain
the appeal of alcohol taken in the kind of quantities
characteristic of Runacles' intake towards the end of 1992 to all
who are not nor have ever been alcoholic. But there is a theory
held by several authorities on alcoholism that in certain
alcoholics, alcohol comes in time to exert a morphine-like
effect. Although how true it is its impossible to
say.While another proposes that
in common with other drugs, alcohol can ultimately tamper with
the body's ability to produce the naturally occurring
pleasure-inducing substances known as endorphins, such as
serotonin and dopamine.Certainly there came a time
in Runacles' life when the thought of an existence without his
beloved elixir filled him with the utmost horror, for what would
he be without it, other than the most hopelessly dull and
timorous individual? Which would not have been the case for the
Runacles of about '82, who was the most incandescent individual
even when sober...a natural extrovert whose warmth, while verging
at times on the fulsome, was viewed with almost universal
appreciation.And while much of this
warmth remained in late '92, it was being sustained by booze, in
fact his entire existence was being held together by ethyl
alcohol. So that when he finally did collapse under the strain of
his responsibilities, it was a messy crash indeed, provoked first
by alcohol alone, then by alcohol in cahoots with prescription
medicine. And a few weeks after that, he suffered another crisis
involving a potentially deadly combination of prescription
medicines.But by this time, he'd
undergone a Damascus-style conversion to born again Christianity;
so that his life from early '93 onwards was as tranquil as it had
once been frantic. Not that it ground to a halt, but it certainly
slowed down to a snail's pace.

Sometime in the early part
of 1993, while still occasionally attending meeting of Alcoholics
Anonymous, he received a call from a man who told him he was from
an organisation by the name of Contact for Christ based near
Croydon in Surrey.He'd got in touch with
Runacles as a result of a card he'd filled in on a British Rail
train some months previously. He tried to put him off, before he
knew it, he was at his door, a neat, dapper man with a large salt
and pepper moustache and gently penetrating deep brown
eyes.He wanted to pray with
Runacles, who promptly ushered him into his bedroom, where they
prayed together at length.Later, he found himself a
guest at his house deep in the south western suburbs where
Runacles was asked to make a list of sins past requiring deep
repentance. And once he'd done this, the two men spent a few
hours praying over each and every one of these sins Runacles had
made a note of.The man was a Pentecostal
of long standing, and therefore convinced that the more
supernatural Gifts of the Holy Spirit such as Tongues and
Prophecy are still available to Believers.In this capacity, he opened
Runacles' eyes to many facts of the Pentecostal world, including
the magazine Prophecy Today, then edited by
the Reverend Clifford Hill, and the works of the late New Zealand
Evangelist and writer Barry R Smith.And to think there was a
time Runacles viewed theories concerning the End Times, or Last
Days prior to the Second Coming of Christ with rabid contempt.
But he was changing on every level. In fact he was barely
recognisable in the early nineties to the man of only a year or
two previously, having become calm and sober, even sedate in
manner.But he'd not entirely lost
his taste for underachievement, for in late '94, he failed his
third and final attempt at qualifying as a teacher. Only to go on
to secure a personal rave review from the London Time Out for his acting in a little-known play on the
Fringe, which is the London equivalent of
Off-Broadway.And his acting triumphs
persisted throughout the '90s, a decade throughout which it could
be said Runacles survived on the minute amount of energy he had
left over after his collapse. But it was hard for him; and in
terms of impetus, he was running on empty.And it may be his
experiences with alcohol and prescription medicine, and the
health crisis these produced, had left him at the mercy of some
kind of depressive condition. But if this was indeed the case, it
was one which while debilitating was yet relatively
mild.For he still had a great
capacity for joy. But a joy born of the peace that comes from the
promise of eternal life, which is infinitely purer and more
profound form than any earthly joy born of a love affair with the
fleeting pleasures of the world. But which doesn't necessarily
preclude great suffering, for from the time of his conversion, he
was engaged in a terrible struggle with what some Christians
called The Old Man.And there had always been a
dark aspect to Paul Runacles, but not in a romantic, Byronic
sense, although this appeal was something he'd always coveted. So
much as one that was in terrible conflict with his warmer, more
affectionate side, which was no less seismically intense than the
other.It had once made him a
ferocious critic of what he saw as the follies of humankind,
while threatening to turn his once tender heart to
stone.But as a Christian, he no
longer sought to condemn people, so much as seek their eternal
salvation. So this aspect was something to be confronted and
tamed, rather than fuelled by corrosively cynical writings, and
then partially controlled by lavish quantities of
alcohol.And from the mid '90s
onwards, he went to war against it, little knowing he had the
most colossal fight of his life on his hands. For having been
sidelined, it's as if it had assumed a terrifying new force, and
was determined to win. And it manifested itself not just as
depression, but intrusive thoughts that seemed to have a life and
power all of their own, in so far as they had an ability to alter
his mood and countenance for extended periods of time, which made
him petrified of them, and so at all times inclined to permanent
social seclusion.The first phase came in '95
when Runacles made contact with a former pastor who ran his own
ministry from a tiny little village in the south of England after
reading an article he'd contributed to Prophecy
Today. And some time later, he travelled down to meet him
where he laid hands on him in his capacity of what is known as
Deliverance Minister. But this was just the first of several
experiences of this kind, one of which saw Runacles being
ministered to by a vicar in his ancient village
church.But nothing could cure
Runacles of his restlessness, and, unable to settle in a single
fellowship for any great length of time, he encountered a vast
variety of churches throughout the '90s...affiliated to the Word
of Faith; Vineyard, Baptist and Elim Pentecostal movements among
others.And in each one, he hoped
to find a lasting solution to his shadow side, the darker
Runacles who tormented him. And which he saw as a throwback to
his pre-Christian self, incubated over the years through
immersion in a decadent culture he now uncompromisingly
rejected.And as he did, he acted
more or less consistently, notwithstanding a fairly lengthy
period of office work, which stretched from about 1997 to 2000,
by which time he'd performed in his final play for a long
time.He then made an attempt at
launching a modest career as a session singer. And as such
recorded a vocal in the style of Chanson
master Charles Trenet, which received some praise for its
closeness to the original. In fact, so much so he was asked to
record a second one in imitation of one of his favourite song
stylists, Nat King Cole, which was rejected.But while his session
career floundered, his singing career was still in full swing,
and he served as front man for a Jazz band for two years between
2000 and 2002. And yet when the latter folded, it was as if
Runacles himself himself in a social sense.But there was still some
fight left in him. And in '03, he started taking himself
seriously as a songwriter for the first time, before attempting
to place some recently demoed songs with a music publishing
company. But none were interested.He turned to creative
writing in early 2006. While the following year, a CD of popular
standards featuring himself and one of the world's leading
harmonica players finally saw the light of day in 2007 after much
rehearsal. And while it received a rave review in the official
magazine of the British Musician's Union the following year, it
only went on to sell a handful of copies.But he'd achieved a degree
of artistic stability nonetheless; and this was reflected in his
church life, for towards the end of the 2010s, he tired of church
hopping, and permanently settled in a Church of England
fellowship in the south western suburbs of
London.Both Evangelical and
Charismatic, it was highly sought after, with up to four services
taking place each Sunday...which meant Runacles could conceal
himself within the congregation if he so
chose.And so it seemed he was
definitively quieted; a bizarre state of affairs for one who'd
once been among the most frenetically extrovert of souls. But if
he found himself all run out, as had been the case all those
years ago, when he collapsed by that muddy field in the Arcadian
heart of England...well, it was only a temporary situation in his
mind, and one day he'd be in a position to quit the wilderness
after so many years of languishment.And yet there'd be times
when, looking back on his youth he'd often weep silently to
himself in the dead of night at the end of yet another day spent
doing really very little when he thought about
it.But he was being typically
harsh with himself. For hermitic as he was, he was far from
worthless. For instance, in his eyes, he'd seen many results from
a powerful prayer ministry. And he continued to grow as a
musician, planning a future for himself as a singer-songwriter
despite being in the midst of late middle age. While he was able
to make a modest living as a writer after more than five years of
trying to set the world wide web on fire with his pen...and
failing.And there'd be times when
certain pieces of quintessentially English pastoral music still
had the power to evoke his strange and sudden flight, or rush of
blood to the head, of over four decades ago. Such as Gerald
Finzi's A Severn Rhapsody, which seemed to
him to bespeak a passion for the Arcadian soul of England that
verges on the ecstatic. And the same could be said for Elgar's
Elegy which tended to convey to him a deep
mournfulness silently existent beneath the picture perfect image
of English privilege.When he ran away from his
college...like some kind of hysterical gymslip schoolgirl...just
the once it was...to avoid being punished for something stupid he
did. And it had been an utterly pointless exercise as it was the
last day of term, but he just panicked and bolted, and kept on
running...And then there was a point
he stopped, because he realised to his horror that he'd arrived
back at his college. And he saw his mother's car. And it pained
him to think what she'd been going through while he ran around
the English countryside like some kind of demented faun, only to
finish up collapsed by the side of a muddy field in the Arcadian
heart of England.And having become newly
mired, he despaired of ever being fully free again. But he
searched for solutions on a constant basis. And he comforted
himself with the thought that even if he failed to effect an
escape, God was beside him, while four decades previously he had
no faith to speak of, other than in the pre-eminence of might.
For after all, is Gods Grace not sufficient?And he took courage from
that fact, while continuing to plan for the time he'd find the
strength to make good on the faith that had been placed in him by
so many for so long. So when he looked back at memories of his
youth, such as the time he ran away from his college on the last
day of term without purpose or aim, it would be in peace not
pain. And he might even return to the scene of his flight as if
in atonement, and commune with the soul of his beloved England
with a passion verging on the ecstatic, and then along with so
many others, put the memory to rest for all
time.